APPLICATION for ATARAXION

[oncogenic]

PLAYER INFORMATION
Your Name: Mal
OOC Journal: mustakrakish
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: OLD AS ROCK N ROLL
AIM: drunkandblogging
E-mail: deanpants[at]gmail.com
Plurk: stagnation
Characters Played at Ataraxion:

• Sherlock Holmes | saidhe
• Sora "Yoite" Koudou | maleit
• Richard "Robin" Grayson | unfiltrating

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Kevin Khatchadourian
Canon: We Need to Talk About Kevin
Original or Alternate Universe: OU
Canon Point: The morning of "the incident".
Number: 048
Setting:

• Book wiki.
• Movie wiki.

History: Eva Khatchadourian never did particularly want the life of a mother and she was never very shy about the fact.

Kevin was a handful of a child right from day one. He sobbed and screamed at all hours of the night, for days on end, never seeming to give his mother any rest - to the point where there's a notable scene where she stands next to a construction worker with a jackhammer for a bit of relief. Just for Mumsey, though. Dad seems to just be able to rock him just fine with no mess and no fuss.

To put it incredibly lightly, Kevin is a problem child. He seems to have a very slow development right from the start. He doesn't reciprocate simple commands ("catch the ball", "throw the ball"), he doesn't respond to many noises (to the point where his mother thinks he may be partially deaf), he doesn't SPEAK. He makes a point to make things very difficult for his mother, even as a toddler. The first word he speaks is "no". The problem is so strenuous that Eva thinks he may even be autistic, but every doctor insists he's a perfectly healthy boy.

When he speaks, it's impetuous. When Eva tries to get him to cooperate with bonding activities, he's sullen and downright angry. There's even an incident when she takes hours upon hours to decorate her study with world maps and her own relics, and he proceeds to fill a water gun with paint and streak the walls of the decorations he so bluntly claimed were "stupid". Yet when it comes to Franklin, he's nothing but smiles and easy banter like a good little boy. Kevin also used bathroom issues to get back at his mother, and wore a diaper well past when he was probably supposed to. He's vindictive to the point of having her change a diaper only to purposefully 'make his business' right in front of her seconds afterwards.

It's a pivotal moment, when Eva throws him onto the changing table, then. He breaks his arm, and a scar is left behind. Their relationship has a shift in it ever since.

Eva seems to be one of the only people who recognizes Kevin for what he truly is - or, at least, she knows that something is very wrong. "If I've claimed, of us two, to 'know' Kevin the better, that is only to say that I know him for being opaque," she details in the book, and truly his life is a circus act with which he is never quite satisfied. He plays pretend for much of it, and as such, it's mildly uneventful. He picks up archery as a hobby at a young age after being read Robin Hood and developing a fascination, a something that became much more important to him later on in the fight.

Which isn't to say his life is without incident. Small things at first, small rebellions, like rubber arrows stuck to windows and vacuuming his younger sister Celia's hair. His tight shirts. Masturbating with the door open when he knows his mother is home. His collection of very potent and deadly computer viruses.

Celia receives a very expensive pet - a small-eared elephant shrew she names Snuffles - who goes missing despite Celia's careful patience with the pet and her recognition of its importance. Later on, though the details are vague and it's never stated outright the reason, there's a clog in the garbage disposal which Eva has to clear out with plumbing fluid. Despite her claim that she puts it away directly after (AND does the child lock), Celia somehow manages to get some of it in her eye. It's entirely possible that Eva made a mistake, and left the toxin out. All Celia has to say on the matter is, "I got something in my eye. Kevin helped me wash it out."

There's a time at his school where students come forth about a teacher who's been supposedly sexually molesting students, Kevin being one of them. His detailing of everything is painstakingly accurate, and though the teacher denies it, Eva suspects something is strange about it all, and in the wake of hearing her son has been supposedly sexually abused, instead wants to send him to a military school for fear that he's getting out of control.

There is never any CLEAR evidence of Kevin doing anything in particular. The view the reader receives is through the suspicious eyes of Kevin's mother, and as such could potentially be very skewed. But given some borderline sociopathic behavior, and an incident later on to which Eva only refers to as Thursday in italics throughout the novel, it's clear that there's something very wrong in the guy's head.

It's not until after Eva's suggestion about Kevin and military school that Franklin finally gives up on what their guise of a marriage has become, suggesting the divorce. He immediately assumes that the children will go to him in the custody battle, as Eva has spent years and years of her life merely tolerating her children, ostensibly (particularly with Kevin). Eva expects Kevin to be happy with the news, as he seems to have spent the first near sixteen years of his life attempting to separate the two, but it's the divorce (and the custody in particular) that seems to actually be Kevin's breaking point.

Most children are mortified by the prospect of their parents' divorce, and I don't deny that the conversation he overheard from the hallway sent Kevin into a tailspin. [...] In retrospect, I can only assume that it was bad enough living with a woman who was cold, suspicious, resentful, accusatory, and aloof. Only one eventuality must have seemed worse, and that was living with [Franklin]. Getting stuck with Dad. Getting stuck with Dad the Dupe.

Existence, for Kevin, is already a dreary and repetitive thing. It's a series of performances, mask after mask, and it's tiring to pretend to be so cheery all the time for his father, to keep up with schoolwork and his classmates. To have an entire life of that and absolute no reprieve, to him, is the worst thing he can imagine as a fifteen-year-old boy, at an age where everything seems infinite.

Three days before his sixteenth birthday, Kevin Khatchadourian wakes up for school a half hour before he needs to. He packs a duffel bag with five Kryptonite locks and chains. He wears a crisp white shirt. He eats no breakfast. He picks a fight in an otherwise pitch-perfect relationship with his father. He has a normal day of school, before he locks the majority of the doors to the school's gymnasium, where several prestiged students have been misled into thinking they're about to win awards for various achievements. He latches the last lock to successfully lock them inside, he takes his bow, and he kills seven students, a teacher, and a cafeteria worker.

Or he would have, had it made it to school that day. It's just after he leaves for that morning that he winds up on the Tranquility. Happy hunting.


Personality: The important thing to know about Kevin is that he's not an evil child. The fact that he is ill-intentioned in so many areas is inarguable, and he thrives on creating chaos and friction between people he knows and places he's been. It's absolute canon that he proceeds to mercilessly kill nine people at his school, and then his sister and father as well, and is imprisoned for the fact, but there's no one thing that determines why these events happen, or even altogether plunge him into some grinning devil poking a stick into life until it does as he pleases.

Kevin demonstrates many signs of textbook antisocial personality disorders. He's detached, he makes no connections with peers, he's charming, he's manipulative, he's a pitch-perfect liar and he has little to no moral concern for awful happenings, either ones that he's heard of or orchestrated personally. Whether or not the diagnosis is truly fitting is unclear, but what's unable to be debated is that there was something very wrong in his head, and that he was born with this coldness.

So much of Kevin is pretend, is mask after mask after mask, and if you asked any particular person their opinion on him, you'd get a hundred different descriptions. To an English teacher of his, he's angry and troubled. To his peers, he's a quiet freak who fits in just enough to not cause concern but not enough to be popular. To his father, he's an angel and just a boy, just a troubled sweet boy. To his mother, he's something entirely twisted and unable to be explained no matter how hard she may try (though she admittedly doesn't try very hard).

He has a different disposition for so many people he comes across, and seems to settle into whichever connotation is most serving for the situation. At his base, he is a charming boy, something arrogant and sometimes not, sometimes cold and sometimes not, sometimes interesting and sometimes not. He maintains his average to a point that the work must be painstaking. Despite being an incredibly bright child and a good study, he maintains straight B's at school - high enough to not cause concern, but not so high as to draw attention to himself.

There have been very few moments where he's been seen as truly vulnerable, where his facades fail him and one sees the actuality of the boy inside. One time is as a child, when he's sick and feverish, and actually takes the time to apologize to his mother; he spends hours reading with her and the two bond. The next morning, he's his same, sullen, sarcastic self with her once again. Another telling moment happens when Kevin overhears his parents discussing custody of the children, where Eva notes that Kevin's eyes, normally so glazed over with the boredom of his own existence, have become two "furnaces", absolutely boiling with the anger of what is unfolding in front of him. She notes it's the most naked that she's ever seen him. Consequentially, the morning before Thursday, when Franklin tries to show Kevin the intricacies of a new camera he gets. Kevin snaps, fiercely telling Franklin that he doesn't care about the stupid camera and how much he despises father-son bonding and anything of the like, how tired he is of his father in general.

It's unfortunate that the most telling and perhaps soul-revealing moment Kevin has comes far too late for it to have done him any good. It's the two year anniversary of his school shooting, and in a few days, he's about to be moved to an actually penitentiary. His fear is palpable, and after two long years of visiting and only making idle banter (if talking at all), Eva asks him a simple, "Why?"

The answer comes from someone who's matured so far from the cocky and arrogant thing he once used to be. Kevin's reply is both very small and very defeated, and it seems to be one of the few truthful things he has ever uttered in his life.

"I used to think I knew."


Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: Kevin shows a strong and adroit inclination for archery, and also for computer work - specifically, he collects computer viruses as a hobby, and is adept enough with a computer to know how to contain such and keep them as souvenirs. Other than his advanced technological skills and his archery, Kevin is a normal human being with normal human limitations and capabilities.

Inventory:

• One (1) white buttoned shirt
• One (1) 40" recurve bow
• One (1) leather quiver with five (5) arrows
• One (1) black duffel bag, containing:
  • Two (2) t-shirts, nearly too small
  • Five (5) Kryptonian locks and chains
  • One (1) copy of Robin Hood
  • Two (2) empty journals
  • Three (3) discs containing advanced computer viruses

Appearance:
[ example1 ] [ example2 ] [ example3 ] [ example4 ]
[ example5 ] [ example6 ] [ example7 ] [ example8 ]
Okay, this is all purely narcissistic at this point. The short answer, Ezra Miller. The long answer, he's a scrawny teenage boy, of average height for his age, who walks with a pronounced slouch so as to consciously make himself smaller, less conspicuous. Kevin has black hair, usually messily (but attractively) styled, sharp features, and eyes that have been noted to have a glaze of disinterest over them nigh constantly. He has a tendency to wear provocative clothes that are too small for him - very tight jeans, and t-shirts that deliberately exaggerate his lithe form.

Age: 15 (three days shy of 16)

AU Clarification:

SAMPLES
Log Sample: Unfamiliarity isn't an unwelcome change per se, but it's certainly something that Kevin would like to have a grip on before he's violently plunged into something so wildly different than what he's used to. He WAS just kind of in some kind of Star Wars tube and intubated. That's not something that happens every day.

When he spills onto the floor, there's a moment, just split second of the hunter in him, of arched shoulder blades and an animalistic wariness that he's not even sure is there, it's gone so quick. Predator or prey? He can't tell yet, but his expression immediately shifts into what he knows he needs, at least until he can figure out what's going on. How any normal person would react when they show up in a futuristic spaceship with no memory as to how they got there, when just that morning they'd been taking a cheery trip on the way to high school.

Panic.

His eyes widen almost robotically, and his face falls into an expression that's both horrified and confused beyond all reason. He's in nothing but his boxerbriefs and, quite frankly, this is all really inconvenient. He had plans. On top of everything else, maybe it's a blessing. But until he knows what it really is, he's not taking and chances. He backs into his grav bed on accident, bumps into it and makes a startled sound before his head whips around to survey the other people in the room. Not a familiar face in sight.

Let the curtains rise, and let the show begin.


Comms Sample:
[ T E X T ]

I know it's kind of the cool and hip thing here to start demanding questions about what's going on and where I am and all that junk, but the way I figure it, that question's gonna get tossed around enough times that I probably have my answer somewhere on this network.

Freaking out but quietly, right? It's not like I'm the special snowflake. There's an awful lot of you here.

Besides, this place needs somebody to ask some of the more important questions. Like do I wanna know how they got my stuff? Or clothes in really disturbingly form-fitting sizes? And lastly, where can I get a decent cheeseburger?

Some decency around here, huh?